writer of speculative fiction and the fantastical

Category Archives: Unsung Stories

Two anthologies which I’ve contributed a story to arrived on the shelves in the last week, and here are the lovely print editions looking very smart indeed.

Infinity Wars (Solaris) is the latest in the Infinity science fiction series edited by Jonathan Strahan with a focus on military SF, and includes my story “Weather Girl”.

‘We have always fought. Tales of soldiers and war go back to the very roots of our history, to the beginnings of the places we call home. And science and technology have always been inextricably linked with the deadly art of war, whether through Da Vinci’s infamous machineries of war or the Manhattan Project’s world-ending bombs or distant starships fighting unknowable opponents.

Oppenheimer once wrote that “the atomic bomb made the prospect of future war unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different country.” But unendurable or not, future always comes. War was integral to science faction at its birth and remains so today, whether on the page or on the screen.

Infinity Wars asks one question: what would Oppenheimer’s different country be like? Who would fight it? Because at the end of it all, it always come down to a soldier alone, risking life and limb to achieve a goal that may never really make sense at all. How would those soldiers feel? What would they experience?’

And here’s the table of contents:

Introduction, Jonathan Strahan

Evening of the Span of Their Days, Carrie Vaughn

The Last Broadcasts, An Owomoyela

Faceless Soldiers, Patchwork Ship, Caroline M Yoachim

Dear Sarah, Nancy Kress

The Moon is Not a Battlefield, Indrapramit Das

Perfect Gun, Elizabeth Bear

Oracle, Dominica Phettaplace

In Everlasting Wisdom, Aliette deBodard

Command and Control, David D. Levine

Conversations with an Armory, Garth Nix

Overburden, Genevieve Valentine

Heavies, Rich Larson

Weather Girl, E. J. Swift

Mines, Eleanor Arnason

ZeroS, Peter Watts

2084 is published by Unsung Stories following a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign and includes my story “The Endling Market”.

‘Fifteen predictions, seventy years in the future. By 2084 the world we know is gone. These are stories from our world seven decades later.

In 1948 George Orwell looked at the world around him and his response was 1984, now a classic dystopian novel. Here eleven writers asked themselves the same question as Orwell did – where are we going, and what is our future?

Visit the dark corners of the future metropolis, trek the wastelands of all that remains. See the world through the eyes of drones. Put humanity on trial as the oceans rise. Say goodbye to your body as humanity merges with technology.

Warnings or prophesies? Paradise or destruction? Will we be proud of what we have achieved, in 2084? Our future unfolds before us.’

2084 features original fiction from:

Christopher Priest (author of The Prestige, The Gradual and many more)

Courttia Newland (author of The Scholar, The Gospel According to Kane and more)

James Smythe (author of The Australia Trilogy and The Anomaly Quartet)

Anne Charnock (author of Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind and A Calculated Life)

Jeff Noon (author of Vurt, Automated Alice, Pollen and many more)

Aliya Whiteley (author of The Beauty and The Arrival of Missives)

E. J. Swift (author of The Osiris Project trilogy)

Oliver Langmead (author of Metronome and Dark Star)

Irenosen Okojie (author of Speak Gigantular)

Malcolm Devlin (author of You Will Grow Into Them)

Cassandra Khaw (author of Hammers on Bone)

Desirina Boskovich (author of Never Now Always and co-author of The Steampunk User’s Manual)

Ian Hocking (author of Deja Vu)

I was also thrilled to receive a copy of Chinese SF magazine ZUI Found, which contains Geng Hui’s translation of my story “Front Row Seat to the End of the World” (first published by NewCon Press in Now We Are Ten). This is the first time I’ve seen my fiction published in another language, and after the first copy went missing in the post, I was hugely grateful to Geng Hui and fellow writer Anne Charnock who orchestrated an exchange of the magazine at this year’s WorldCon in Helsinki.

As to which piece was mine, the evidently untranslatable Instagram and Tinder were the crucial giveaway…